Tales of the Marvelous

The first female sword-hero in Chinese fiction, and the story behind the film The Assassin. A general's daughter is stolen at ten by a wandering nun, trained for years in invisibility and the killing arts, then sent to murder a man — and chooses, instead, her own master and her own code.

One of the founding wuxia tales: the Three Heroes of the Wind and Dust. The slave-girl Red Whisk picks her own fate and elopes with the strategist Li Jing; on the road they meet a fierce curly-bearded swordsman who means to seize the empire — until he meets the true dragon and gives it all up.

The ancestor of every cultivation trial. A ruined spendthrift is bankrolled twice by a mysterious alchemist, then asked to repay him by guarding an elixir furnace through a night of hell's illusions — forbidden, on pain of failure, to make a single sound. He endures every horror but the last: a mother's love.

A beloved Tang fantasy romance. The failed scholar Liu Yi meets a dragon princess herding sheep in the wilds, cast out and abused by her husband's family, and carries her letter down to the lake-palace of her father the Dragon King — where her uncle, the Qiantang dragon, erupts in a storm of war to bring her home.

The Tang original behind The Romance of the Western Chamber — and far more unsparing. The scholar Zhang wins the reluctant Cui Yingying through her maid Hongniang, loves her, then abandons her and calls it wisdom. The star-crossed romance that Chinese theater spent centuries trying to give a kinder ending.

A rooftop rescue-heist that reads like a film. Mo Le, the superhuman Kunlun slave, scales walls, kills the guard dogs, and carries his lovesick young master and a captive singing-girl over the roofs of the city to freedom — then pays for it when the secret gets out. Pei Xing at his most cinematic.

A second Tang sword-heroine. Hongxian, a warlord's quiet maidservant, is secretly a martial adept; to stop a war she slips by night into a rival general's guarded bedchamber and steals the gold box from beside his pillow — drawing no blood — then reveals what she is and departs to repay an old karmic debt.

The companion to the pillow-dream, and a wry ancestor of isekai. Drunk under an old pagoda tree, Chunyu Fen is carried into the Kingdom of Huai'an, marries a princess, and governs a province for twenty years — then wakes to find the whole kingdom was an ant colony among the roots of the tree.

The great tragic romance of the Tang. The courtesan Huo Xiaoyu gives everything to the scholar Li Yi, who swears devotion and then abandons her for a respectable marriage; she dies of grief — and returns as a vengeful ghost to poison every union he tries to make. Love, betrayal, and revenge from beyond the grave.

A redemption romance that inverts the tragedy. The courtesan Li Wa ruins a smitten young nobleman, who falls to singing funeral dirges for coppers and freezing in the streets — then she takes him back, nurses him whole, and drives him to pass the imperial exams. Bai Xingjian's tale of a woman who undoes her own damage.

The artifact-power tale at the root of the tradition. A magic bronze mirror passes from hand to hand, unmasking and destroying fox-spirits, serpents, and plague-demons across a linked cycle of hauntings. Wang Du's early chuanqi — the ancestor of every enchanted object that sees what wears a human face.